All About These Recipes

The Hasty Gastronome was born of a recipe exchange that resulted in an abundance of other people's favourite recipes. They were too sumptuous to not share them.

But the recipes slowed, and my own cooking has continued, and this blog has subsequently adapted to become my own, personal place of online dotage for cooking adventures good enough to share.

Recipes for Hasty Gastronomes should not have too many ingredients, or be overly complicated to make (the exception being baking, which is a necessarily time-costly labour of love). Most importantly, they should be recipes that you make again and again, and probably know by heart.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Peach and yoghurt muffins with spicy crumble tops

So my wonderful BF has requested that I refrain from baking entire cakes given that we're a household of two, he works from home, and has something of a mad sweet tooth. But similarly, in light of said sweet tooth, he does look awfully sad when I bake things and then take them to work and he doesn't get any. So in receiving a bag of fresh peaches from his Mum's tree, I had a dilemma. I dilemma I solved with muffins.

I don't care what illusion about muffins being healthy anyone tries to delude themselves with: muffins are tiny cakes. Incredible tiny cakes. I also do not endorse those giant cafe sized muffins that are the size of a baby's head. They are just bigger cakes. I like muffins to be a bit wholesome, full of fruit, sweet, moist and just big enough to stave of the urge to eat lunch at 11am. They also allow me to leave a few at home for Leith, and still supply baked goods for the Monday WIP, thus earning double kudos.

The other wonderful thing about this recipe is that peaches can be interchanged for pretty much any other kind of fruit you have to hand. Banana would be excellent. Pineapple would be amazing. Berries, apple, pear. You name it, you nom it.

In baking these muffins, one must invoke several of my fundamental rules of baking. This is a good thing. Namely:

Bake with yoghurt wherever possible.

Use your hands.

No matter how much spice a recipe recommends, always use more. I don't know why so many recipes are spice shy but I call bullshit on it. If you're anything like me, use, like, three times as much, probably.*

Lick your fingers.

Don't measure any ingredients in crumble topping. If in doubt, add more sugar.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 1/4 cup oats

1/3 cup packed brown sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons baking powder

2 teaspoons cinnamon

2 teaspoons allspice

1 egg

1 egg white

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 heaped cup yoghurt

1/3 cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla

5 peaches

Crumble topping:

Butter

Flour

Brown sugar

Oats

Finely chopped walnuts

All spice

Preheat the oven to 200 C, and grease a 12 cup muffin tray well.

Mix the flour, oats, baking powder, sugar and spices in a bowl. In a second bowl, whisk your wet ingredients.

Peel and dice your peaches and stir them through your wet ingredients. Stir in the dry ingredients.

Spoon into your muffin pan. Don't overfill them because you are going to add crumble topping to that business!

Rub your crumble topping together with your fingers. Don't bother measure anything, just use roughly equal proportions of all the dry ingredients (except the allspice) and mix. If it's too dry, add butter. If too wet, add more flour and sugar. Sprinkle generously over the muffins and gently press in.

Bake for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes in the pan, then on a wire rack.

Take to work in a cane basket lined with a gingham teatowel. For real.

*Unless your using one of my recipes, in which case I have already amped up the spices hugely. Then again, go harder than me. I will only respect you.

1 comment:

I made these this morning to use some peaches from my tree. Sorry to say they didn't turn out well at all. They hardly rose and were greasy and very heavy. I have been baking for 50 years so I'm not a novice. I have found that when I use oil instead of butter or margarine I get that greasy, heavy product. My muffins are usually well risen and get raves. Will try to find another peach muffin recipe as these will be given to my grandkids and I hope they will eat them.